I have to say that I'm not a fan. In fact I'd never used them before writing here, but have got into the habit simply because they are such a common feature of the 'house style', and certain fussier pubs insist on them. I no longer write for those fuss pots, but the habit has stuck.

I don't mind them, but genuinely don't see what the bring to the punctuation party that I can't already do with commas or parentheses (brackets, as we would say in British English), or a colon.

This reluctance to use the em dash may come from having grown up and been schooled in the era of handwritten text. Right up through university finals, everything was written with a fountain pen (Jesus Jesus Jesus, that makes me sound like some kind of Dickensian relic!).

And unless you are typing or setting print, there is no way, short of getting you ruler out, to mark the precise length of an 'en' or 'em', which were instead confined to handy adjacent row overlap words in games of Scrabble.

That may be why they were not encouraged by English teachers at school, so never became a regular part of my armoury.